


And They Lived: A Sleeping Beauty AU

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Sleeping Beauty Fusion, Ark AU, Eventual Bellarke, F/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-07-02 15:55:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15799785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: General Summary: Everyone knows the story of Clarke Griffin, the Sleeping Beauty of the Ark: one of the first children born in space, she fell into a deep sleep on her eighteenth birthday, and, hidden somewhere on the vast space station, she is sleeping still.Bellamy doesn't believe in fairy tales like that.But Clarke, her peaceful existence in the City of Light now shattered, is increasingly starting to believe in the Ark.Chapter Two Summary: Clarke Griffin is the unofficial Princess of the Ark: beloved by all, a symbol of hope for a time when humanity may return to the ground again. While exploring the ship’s back rooms on her eighteenth birthday, she meets a woman who predicts their people’s fate may be much darker, and has a novel solution in mind.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Requested by anonymous on tumblr, so long ago I'm sure they've forgotten, but here it is anyway.
> 
>  _A quick note regarding characters and pairings_ : The first chapter of this story is very Abby-centric, but later chapters will focus more on Clarke (particularly chapters 2 and 4) and Bellamy (particularly chapter 3) and ultimately, this is a Bellarke story (particularly in chapters 5 and 6). I'll be adding more tags for characters, ships, and other content as I post new chapters.
> 
> This fic takes place in an alternate universe that uses elements from the canon, but is decidedly not the canon, and often doesn’t play by canon rules. Characters from the canon-present are transported to the canon-past, and vice versa. Backstories change (including that of the Ark itself). Timelines are altered. The central crisis of the pre- and early-canon, the lack of oxygen on the Ark, does not exist, and the delinquents are not delinquents (or at least, they haven't been caught and officially labeled as such). 
> 
> I also used a large amount of nonsense soft-sci-fi science in this story. I hope that all of the details at least make sense in that they are internally consistent and successfully hold up and enable the plot—but still, some 'scientific' explanations are ill-defined on purpose, and some parts are unbelievable to the point of being magical, also on purpose. Think of it as a sci-fi fairy tale.

Once upon a time, Abby Mayfield loved fairy tales. She loved, in particular, the gigantic book of stories in her grandmother's house, a tome so large that it spread across both their laps when opened, when they sat reading it together through long, bright childhood afternoons. As her grandmother repeated the familiar, soft words of the tales themselves, Abby traced her fingers over the illustrations: beautiful princesses in gorgeous blue and pink and purple gowns, wandering through mysterious forests, stuck in ornate castle bedrooms, meeting their handsome princes, falling in love. The pages of the book were thick and the text richly typed, and the opening letter of every tale was embossed in splendid shades of red, and towered huge over the other letters in its wake. And the sun would shine in from the big picture window in the middle of the room, and pick out the richest shades in the wooden floors and the furniture and on their own clothes, bathing them, transforming them, until Abby felt herself no longer a little girl in a little house in the New England woods but a princess herself, free and safe in a vast fairy world, her happy ending always reliably ahead.

Now the book is at the bottom of a large cardboard box, anchoring a small pile of medical textbooks and hidden by a crumpled, badly folded map of the Washington D.C. subway system.

The box is unbelievably heavy and Abby struggles with its weight as she weaves her way into the apartment, finally setting it down with a pained groan on the living room floor. She shakes out her arms and wipes the sweat from her brow, takes a long moment to catch her breath. Then, finally, she allows herself to look around.

This is the first time she has been in the apartment by herself. She stopped by once, initially, with Callie, to take a look at the place, and again a week later to sign the lease. And for the last three hours she's been carting boxes up and down from Callie's boyfriend's truck, but on every other trip Callie, or the boyfriend, or both, have been with her, piling up boxes of books and kitchen supplies, heaps of bedding, suitcases of clothes, baskets of miscellany. After every trip they've dropped their current burden on the floor and headed back downstairs, back to the glaring sun and white-blue sky and hot-pavement smell of the first burst of summer, back to the truck for another round.

Marcus can only stay through dinner so they're trying to be quick. But it still feels like the truck has an endless supply of _stuff_ in it, more stuff than Abby believes two women could have possibly accumulated in twenty-six years' worth of life each.

She's not sure where either of her co-movers is now but before she winds her weary way back down to the street, she takes a moment just for herself. For herself, in her new apartment, with its wooden floors and curtainless windows, its piles of mismatched boxes crowding up the empty space, not a stick of furniture to be seen. It is an unfinished home in every sense of the phrase. The kitchen, separated from the main room by only an island countertop, will barely do for two people and the bathroom, she already knows, will be uselessly over-crowded with all of their toiletries. The bedrooms are small with poor views from the windows. But the living room—this is the spot that made her fall in love. 

They picked this place mostly because they could afford it, partly because of its proximity to two different subway stops, and partly for this, for the window that looks onto the main room, a giant double window that lets in the most beautiful, clear, illuminating light. A transforming light. A light that brings her back somehow to a place she cannot name, cannot quite—

"Abby?"

For a second, she feels dizzy, as if she'd been pulled back at the last moment from an intoxicating abyss. 

Probably just residual light-headedness, she thinks, from so many elevator trips.

"Sorry," Callie says. She's carrying a plastic bin, from the top of which a collection of soaps and shampoos haphazardly peaks. "Didn’t mean to startle you. Marcus is bringing the last of it up now and then he said he'd pick up dinner for us, if you want."

She does. She very much does. As soon as Callie says the word _dinner_ , her stomach starts to rumble.

"Sounds perfect. Chinese?"

Callie grins. "Already told him." She sets the bin down on the kitchen island countertop and then rushes over, grabbing Abby in an unexpected, fierce hug. "Our first night in our new place!” She sounds giddy, like the teenager she was when they first met. Again Abby feels herself falling uncertainly in time. “Can you believe it?"

Abby returns the hug slowly, her arms weak and tired, her whole body exhaustion-stripped and her mind buzzing with uncertainty, anticipation, and, too, a bit of the excitement that suffuses Callie's voice. Like she's still on the edge of that great cavern, the ragged edge of time. "I really can't," she says. "I really can't." 

*

Two weeks later they're eating take-out again, this time pizza and wings from a tiny place on Abby's route home from the hospital. They’re sitting on the floor instead of on the new sofa because they've swiped a coffee table from Callie's mother's house in Alexandria but they haven't gotten around to buying a real dining table yet, or real chairs, and because the whole apartment, even with most of the boxes unpacked and the beds set up and some real food in the fridge, still feels uncertain, like it hasn't yet been properly broken in. Abby's still wearing her scrub pants and her fingers are covered in barbeque sauce. There is a more than even chance that there is sauce on her chin. And she's tired and full and she feels a glimmer of happiness within her, too, a golden thread pulling all her weary limbs together. She doesn't quite know what it is. Accomplishment, maybe. Or optimism.

At least for now.

"This really isn't sustainable," she says, as she throws a balled-up napkin in the vague direction of her empty plate. "We _have_ to start cooking dinner at some point."

Marcus waves his hand dismissively and reaches across the table for another slice of pizza. The man has a bottomless stomach. Since Abby last saw him, he has shaved off his beard and cut his hair, which is probably the price of a fancy government-lawyer job. He looks less rugged and manly now, and more upstanding-suit-and-tie citizen, and Abby personally thinks this is a bit of a step down. "I think a resident and a State Department intern in a new city are allowed a few pizza nights now and then," he declares, with admirable confidence.

"He's just saying that because he'd never allow himself a pizza night if he were at his place right now," Callie says, and when he looks about to argue, she puts her finger over his lips and holds it there while she addresses Abby again. "What about this new boy of yours? Can we enlist him to cook for us?"

Abby rolls her eyes. "We've only gone on two dates," she reminds them. "I'm not bringing him over and demanding he make me dinner yet."

" _Yet_ ," Marcus emphasizes, pushing Callie's hand away. "That's, what, a fifth date request...?"

Abby crosses her arms against her chest and points up her chin. "You've been hanging around for months now and I've yet to see _you_ make _us_ dinner, so you tell me."

"Us?" He raises his eyebrows. "I cook very well but I'm not—"

"I'll believe that when I see it," Callie interrupts, but she's smiling, and when Marcus looks truly offended she softens the blow with a kiss to his cheek. "I'm kidding. You're a much better cook than me. Anyway, don't let her change the subject. I'm trying to learn about this new guy here."

"You know almost everything that I know," Abby says, shrugging, and then busies herself with stacking plates and gathering trash. This isn't quite the truth, of course, though she hopes if she sounds sufficiently unconcerned, sufficiently dull, Callie will let the conversation drop. Or Marcus will lead it off in another direction again, as he does, asking what that's supposed to mean, _everything_ , and how much does Abby know about _him_ , and if he's being secretly lured into some commune-style cult.  

Callie tells him that he's just dating one of a pair of close best friends, and doesn't he get that concept, and Abby smiles and lets them take the conversation from her hands. It’s true, they _are_ close, but still she hasn't told Callie _everything_ -everything about Jake Griffin yet. Already she's gathering inside herself secrets she may never tell. Private, trembling secrets, things she doesn't even want to say to herself in words. Like how it's only been two dates but already she has a feeling about him. Like how just thinking his name or picturing his face makes her heart beat harder, her nerves thrill and her whole body set itself to alert, how she feels sometimes and at the most random of moments suffused with a childlike wonder and fascination, a tender true affection, a breathtaking anticipation, as if he were her first schoolyard crush all over again. Maybe her first something else. Her first true love? 

Is it ridiculous to be thinking that so soon? 

Callie would want to dissect the feeling completely, to break it up into its component parts so she can search out the one that is _love_ , or almost-love or the first eager seeds of love, and from there determine that love's origins as wells its depth and breadth and height. What sort of love is it? What will become of it next? This is her attitude toward all mysteries.  

And Marcus—Abby is less sure of him, but she suspects he would not believe her at all. Whether he believes in love of any sort, even the sedate, earned variety, she can't be sure. 

And she is not in the mood either to analyze or to defend. So she leaves them to their argument, silly as it may be, and clambers up to her feet, their empty dishes in her hands. She drops them off in the sink, then takes out her phone. 

One new message. 

_Can't wait for tomorrow night._  

From Jake. 

She smiles and a deep warmth blooms out between her ribs.  

*

The first outfit says _I'm trying too hard_ , which is not how she wants to present herself, nor how she wants to feel. For their first date, they had lunch at a sandwich place near Jake's apartment; she wore jeans and her hair back in a braid and he wore sneakers with a hole in them that he said he'd had since freshman year, and it was easy, and she felt easy and at ease.

But this blue dress and her only pair of high heels and she has no idea what to do with her hair—this is not an Abby Mayfield she recognizes. This is like little girl Abby in adult Abby's body, trying to be a princess.

Grabbing for her fairy tale again.

But it's the first time they've ever planned to eat a real sit-down fancy-restaurant dinner, and the place Jake told her about just sounds so _nice_. She's never been. When she told Callie about it, though, Callie raised her eyebrows and said, "If you hadn't just met a month ago, I'd be predicting a proposal" in that straight no-nonsense tone she has, which is not reserved for jokes or speculation or slumber party secrets, but rather for official matters of state. Remembering it now makes Abby want to throw all of her clothes out the window, cancel the date, and stay in bed.

Except that she's still counting the hours until she gets to see Jake again, and she'd rather show up in a sweatshirt and sandals than break their plans.

And she knows that the restaurant doesn’t really mean anything, except maybe that he’s trying to impress her. But there’s something exciting in that too: that he might be trying to impress her.

She tries on a simpler dress and ditches the heels, starts to feel more like a dressed-up version of herself than some imposter, and comes out into the living room to get a best friend opinion on her choice.

Callie's settled on the couch, lying down with her feet up on the far arm and her laptop open on her stomach, and the fingertips of her left hand resting lightly just above her chin. It is the posture of her fingers that gives Abby pause. Callie used to bite her nails whenever she got nervous, and she only broke the habit after a solid year of clear nail polish taught her a hardened sense of self-control. Now whenever she is especially on edge her fingertips creep up toward her lips like she wants to fall off that wagon again. That, and the way her eyes never stray from the screen, even when Abby asks, "How do I look in this?" ping a warning light red and bright in her mind. _Something’s wrong_ , she thinks, just as she thought once into the terrible blank silence after her mother hung up the phone, the day they got the news her grandmother had died.

“Callie?” she asks, and steps up closer.

“What? Oh, sorry.” She flicks her gaze over her shoulder, just for a second, a see-through smile on her face. Then she’s staring at the screen again. Her hand drifts down to her neck, stretched and searching, the slightest clenching of her fingers around air. “My boss is on livestream.” She tries to make it sound light, a bit of trivia or a curiosity, but she’s lying. Abby can hear it.

This isn’t the first press conference Secretary of State Wallace has held this summer. There is already a certain mundanity to them, in fact; they’re a habit that’s crept up on the nation with alarming subtlety and grace. Even the headline, blaring red and white across the bottom of the screen, _Nuclear Crisis_ , does not hit with the same punch it did when it first started appearing in the spring.

Still, Abby leans forward with her hands on the sofa arm behind Callie’s head, and Callie turns the volume up all the way.

“…The United States continues to engage in multi-lateral talks to forestall the use of these weapons, which we and all rational countries, all rational persons, acknowledge would be devastating on a global scale…”

“He’s not saying anything new, is he?” Abby asks. Her dress is still partly unzipped in the back and her voice comes out much softer than she’d wanted it to.

Callie shakes her head, the movement almost imperceptible. 

“It’s not what he’s saying. It’s where he’s saying it, and what he’s leaving out.”

Before Abby can ask what that’s supposed to mean, Callie closes her laptop with a decisive snap and twists around to look at her, taking her all in. She is so good, so much better than Abby is, at switching off one train of thought and jumping right onto another. “Is that what you’re wearing tonight?”

She nods, numb.

“Well, don’t. The blue dress is so much nicer. You look so good in blue.” 

*

She wears the blue dress to dinner at seven, Jake’s shirt to raid his fridge at ten, and nothing at all at midnight when, still awake, fuzzy-headed but blissful, tracing the still-new angles and curves of each other’s bodies beneath the spill of orange-yellow light from the bedside lamp, they start talking about the future again.

“I want kids, some day,” Jake admits. The words are said with some hesitation, and some guilt: a secret too closely kept and too easily shared, a moment of disclosure more intimate even than naked tangled-up limbs or pillows shoved off the bed and to the floor.

But Abby, stretched across the bottom half of the bed where the blankets used to be, occupying herself with lazy kisses to the jut of his hipbone, only looks up at him with a jolt of surprise and smiles. She feels that warmth again, unfurling now all the way out to her toes. It should be too soon to say these things. That bashful look on his face says he knows it. Yet she’s thought them, too: sudden soft-lit flashes of the future. Their future.

She bites his hip, teasing, not sharp, and nuzzles her nose into the soft hollow of his side. “A daughter,” she says. 

And the tension balled up in his stomach unfurls, a fluttering beneath her fingertips. 

She feels Jake’s fingers carding through her hair, tangling in it. She can hear the soft smile in his voice. “Yeah? I can see you with a daughter.”

"A little girl with blue eyes," she murmurs. "And your smile."

_His_ blue eyes, _his_ smile—there is no need, after all, to pretend that they're not imagining their child, that they have not already, in their own minds, twined their futures together just so. A rush of what is to come, or might be to come, a rush of what feels so real it is almost there beneath her fingertips, washes over her and through her and through them both.

"Hair like yours," Jakes answers, wistful.

"But lighter. Blonde."

She can feel him smiling. She feels it in the exhale of his breath, as she starts to kiss a trail along the bottom edge of his ribs.

"And she'll be brilliant," he's saying. The word _brilliant_ sparks up like a match in the darkness. In its glow Abby can see her, for a moment, the image of her own little girl there in the space behind her eyelids when she closes her eyes. "Just as brilliant as she is beautiful."

"And compassionate and kind," she adds.

"Talented. Artistic."

"Strong-willed."

"Like you?"

Abby smiles, slow and lazy, and drags herself all the way up the bed at last until they're lying nose to nose. Her arm wrapped around his chest, his curling down over her waist.

"Yes, just like me."

"And she'll be stubborn. And determined."

"And brave. Stubborn and determined and brave."

Their voices, light as night air and soft-woven as dreams, seem to pass, not between them as audible sound, but through them as vibrations gently thrumming across skin. As if they were conjuring something magical, tapping into something old and to the whole rest of the world still unknown, something secret and private that shines bright only in this little one-bedroom apartment, only in the splash of soft light from this one lamp. A magic beyond words and explanations, deep hidden in time but light and simple as a half-remembered childhood dream, or childhood story, as clear as the light that falls through the picture window in the early afternoon—

Jake's fingers are sliding through the tangles in her hair. When they snag on one, and he disengages them carefully, and laughs an apologetic laugh, and she is brought back to that wide handsome grin on his face, she is left stranded for a moment in the aftermath of a swirl of thought she can no longer begin to recall. Here she is, back in herself again. Back in this man's arms, back in his bed. Hair tousled and her clothes still left haphazard on the floor. 

She blinks and clears the future and the past away. Then she leans in very slowly with the palm of one hand light against his cheek, and kisses him, and tends the glow of loving him as if it were a flame. 

*

Thrown from her soft-lit weekend and down into the sheen of the white fluorescent overheads, Monday morning, and feeling every inch of the hour and the day, Abby makes her way on tired feet to the hospital break room for coffee. She has a few minutes, at least, to spare.

A handful of doctors and nurses are gathered at the table and next to the cabinets, taking their time off when they can get it. Most of them look pretty much how she feels. She slides between two interns to reach for a mug from one of the shelves and realizes most of the small crowd is watching the TV.

"We will not be intimidated—"

Secretary of Defense Tsing has perfectly combed and gleaming black hair and looks younger than his years. He carries himself with military authority. Abby stares at the hard, square set of his shoulders, the thin pinstripe red of his tie.

"We will not be menaced. Any country that dares threaten us or our allies must understand that the United States—"

She holds her mug in both hands, and forgets, for a moment—still as stone, still as granite, still as a woman bewitched—that a minute ago she felt like she would utterly break down without just one hit of caffeine. 

"That the weaponry of the United States is unparalleled among all nuclear nations—" 

*

In mid-August, on the two-month anniversary of the date that they moved in, Marcus shows up at the apartment door with two bags full of groceries and announces he's going to cook. He tells Abby to invite Jake. She gets the feeling this is the capstone of a petty half-playful fight with Callie, an attempt to prove himself, but she hates cooking and enjoys fancy dinners and so she can't say that she minds.

Callie is late, so while Marcus cooks the chicken and boils the pasta, she and Jake sit by themselves at the kitchen island and the three of them make small talk, mostly about work. But Jake's engineering projects are both inscrutable and, often, too secret to be discussed, so Marcus and Abby do most of the talking. He tells stories of past cases with certain important details omitted and she recounts her meetings with a few unusual patients in carefully general terms.

“Our jobs would be much more interesting if we weren’t so concerned with people’s privacy,” she notes, into a lull, and Marcus barks out an incredulous laugh.

“Yes, to hell with people’s privacy!” he says, with a flourish of his cooking spoon.

The sound of his voice, the bubbling of the water at full boil, the whir of the fan over the stove, all combine to drown out the crack and shove of the apartment door opening, so that when Callie appears in the doorway it is almost without warning. "Why are you damning people's privacy?" she asks, with barely an ounce of concern. She's carrying a tall, rectangular shopping bag, which she sets down on the countertop. Then she kicks off her shoes and sends them scuttling toward the fridge.

"We're sharing vague work stories," Abby explains, and Callie nods sagely, as if it all made sense.

"And Marcus is making dinner, like he's promised me for a week," she adds. She tugs at his arm—demanding a moment's distraction, offering a kiss in greeting—then retreats and pulls up the third island stool. "It's moments like these I really love you."

"I love you, too," he sighs, long-suffering, and turns the burner heat down low.

Callie sticks out her tongue in his direction, though his back is turned and he can't see, and Abby knows she must be in a very good mood. "So if we're telling work stories," she continues, still bright, "shouldn't Jake be dominating the discussion? Private firm, no patients, no clients..." She bobs her head, her voice verging on the sing-song. "Or is engineering work just really boring?"

Abby raises her eyebrows. "You're unusually upbeat." Then she grows serious, an exaggerated anxiousness on her face and in her voice. "Have you been drinking?"

"Asks the woman currently downing a beer herself," Callie counters, and slides the bottle Abby is holding right out from between her fingers. "Anyway—Jake—tell us about your job. Is it nice working somewhere where you don't have to worry about everything being classified all the time?"

Jake opens his mouth to answer, but Abby, already heading toward the fridge to get a replacement drink, cuts him off. “Actually, he wouldn’t know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means his work _is_ classified. Top _secret_ classified.”

Callie is incredulous, but curious, already starting to grin with the anticipation of some particularly scandalous reveal, while Abby hops back up on her stool and gives a slow, meaningful nod of her head. Jake, for his part, only tilts back his beer and stares at it, like he’s examining the precise shades of brown highlighted by the overhead light. “My firm’s been contracted to do this project,” he says, after a moment, hesitant as a confession, light as small talk about the weather.

“So far, so normal,” Marcus quips from his post next to the stove.

“And,” he takes in a deep, stalling breath, poking with this thumb at the edge of the label on his beer, “it’s for the government. Homeland Security—FEMA specifically, but there's some DARPA involvement too. Which is already more than I should probably say. And…yeah.” He shrugs, then takes a long, slow drink. "If I say any more, I'd probably be killed."

He doesn't look up after he says it, just lets the bottle topple down onto its base again. It rings out a clear, quiet chime of glass as it circles against the countertop. If he'd been trying to lighten the mood, Abby thinks, he would glance around now to see how the joke had landed. But he doesn't.

"I think the expression is 'if I say any more, I'd have to kill you," Callie says, into the silence.

It's not quite enough to break the bubble, that serious quiet that Jake has created, into which voices can venture, but which they cannot breach. Then Marcus murmurs under his breath, "It's not an expression," and Abby notices, out of the corner of her eye, how Jake winces.

Abby opens her mouth to change the subject, but Callie cuts her off, ignoring her just as surely as she ignores the awkward thrum of the silence. "Okay...an engineering firm working with FEMA... What could your project be...? Are you, perhaps, building a _bunker_?"

"No—"

"Dammit, Callie, this isn't twenty questions." 

Marcus's voice is sharp enough to startle even himself. The reprimand, its rapport like a gun shot, makes Callie almost choke on her beer, and sends a spasm of aftershock through Marcus's hands. Abby notices the way his fingers clench for a moment around the handle of the oven door. It is that involuntary shudder of movement that makes her own heart skip a startled beat, and under the counter she puts her hand on Jake's knee and squeezes, hard.

She thinks she hears Callie ask, "What do you know?" but she's not sure. And if Marcus answers, those words are lost to the far distance. For a moment, she knows only one real, trustworthy sensation: the touch of Jake's hand on top of hers. 

Marcus announces that dinner is ready, and she and Callie begin to pull down four plates from the cupboard and a random handful of utensils from the drawer. The small flurry of activity, the clanking sounds of metal and ceramic filling the room, the awkward sway of bodies avoiding collision with bodies, all provide a good excuse not to talk.

But the moment holds less sway than Abby thought it would.

Perhaps they all feel their own share of guilt, and an equal desire to shake away the feeling of standing on the edge of an abyss.

After, as they're clearing the plates and throwing leftovers in the fridge, Callie's eyes fall on the shopping bag she'd left sitting on the counter, and she grabs it up with an excited, "Oh! I forgot about this. Abby, I got us a housewarming gift."

"Two months late and we live in an apartment," Abby answers, shutting the fridge door and turning just in time to catch Callie's unceremonious unwrapping. "But okay."

Inside the tall, rectangular bag is a tall, rectangular box, about the size and shape of a small, singular speaker, roughly the height of a desk lamp. On it is a picture of a simple black column with a blue light, like a glowing eye, toward the top.

"What is that thing?" Marcus asks, immediately skeptical.

Jake takes the box and turns it around in his hands, reading the description on the side. "I've heard of these," he says. "It's a... what’s it called? An Alie. Like a home assistant type thing."

"An Alie..." Abby repeats, so softly that the others don’t even hear. They've already started opening the box, Callie taking it from Jake to do the actual setting up, while Marcus plucks out the instructions and starts skimming them. The Alie itself, seen in real life, is somewhat less impressive even than the box it came in: smaller than Abby was expecting, once all the wrapping materials have been thrown aside onto the floor. Unlike its picture, this model is a bright cherry-red with a black strip around the middle and a black base. The little blue eye at the top is unlit, giving the whole gadget a dormant, sleeping air.

It is, Abby thinks, a strange thing. Only out of its box a few minutes, not even turned on, yet already she feels its presence in the room. _That's a living thing_ , a small voice in her head warns. And she knows that's not true but—

_That's not a computer. That's beyond circuits and wires and plastic. That's—_

"It's one of those virtual assistants," Callie explains. "You turn it on and you can ask it things like, what is the weather like, or to call someone, or to turn on your lights. Stuff like that. But honestly I mostly got it because it can tell the future."

"It cannot tell the future," Marcus scoffs, glancing up for a moment from his perusal of the fine print.

"Well, not really," Callie concedes. "Not any more than a magic eight ball can. But it has a fortune teller mode where you can ask it questions about your future and it will answer you and I thought that could be fun."

"Sure," Marcus answers, still arch. The instruction pages have accordioned out in his hands, and he flips them over and turns them around and adds, "If you can even figure out how to turn it on—"

"Got it."

The machine emits a whirring sound, like an industrial fan turning on, the blue light at the top snaps into life, and it turns first all the way to the left, then back to the right before it stops, staring at Abby straight on. She shivers, wraps her arms around herself, and looks away.

Marcus, though, is looking suspiciously at Jake. "How did you do that? You'd need a doctorate in tech speak just to understand this thing." He holds up the crumpled instruction packet.

"Or a doctorate in engineering to understand _this_ thing," Jake answers, and taps the top of the Alie lightly. "I set up the app on Abby's phone and hooked it up."

"That's what happens when you leave your phone lying around where Jake can find it," Callie notes. She's already staring at the Alie and grinning. "So who wants to know more about what will be?"

Abby does not. The thing, Alie—it feels too real, too human, for the article—is still staring at her with its shining blue eye.

The others seem more game, though: Jake to see if his ad hoc installation worked, Callie to play with her new toy. Even Marcus seems morbidly curious as he shoves the instructions back in the box and pulls out a stool.

"Okay." Callie rubs her hands together, almost devious. "Alie, tell me the future."

Another whirring sound, and a slight jerky movement in the direction of Callie's voice. "Future mode activated," a smooth, cool, feminine voice answers.

"Alie, will Marcus ever be able to understand your instructions?"

Alie makes another abrupt wrenching motion. The movement reminds Abby of an old typewriter resetting itself for a new line of text. "Not likely," it answers. 

Marcus crosses his arms tight across his chest and rolls his eyes. "It basically _is_ a high-tech magic eight ball," he mumbles.

They try a few more questions, and Abby—the only one still standing, the only one who won't take her eyes off Alie for a second—starts to get used to the little electronic sounds and the mechanical movements that signify Alie thinking. Still she keeps herself alert. She keeps watch and she keeps ready.

"Abby, you should ask her one," Callie says, finally, noticing at last the silence from the far end of the island.

"No. No, I don't even know what to—"

"Anything. Seriously, any question. Whatever's on your mind."

Abby takes a deep breath, but instead of using it to argue, she only sighs. Too much of a fuss, too much resistance, and you make a scene. She doesn't want to make a scene, not now. She doesn't want anyone to question her uneasiness, to make her put into words what has sparked this uncertainty in her, because she _can't_ explain it, and she's sure if she tried she'd just sound silly. She’ll sound silly and no one will believe her gut aversion, and she doesn’t want to argue about this, not yet.

But she can't think of anything trivial or inconsequential to ask, so she just opens her mouth and lets go the first words that spring into her mind.

"Alie, will I ever have children?"

The question seems to surprise Alie as much as it does Abby's friends. They'd been testing the gadget with queries about the eternal summer roadwork or the fate of TV characters or the truth of Washington gossip, but here is a question from the heart. A hope and a yearning she's never shared with Callie, certainly never brought up with Marcus. One that she and Jake treat as a secret even within and between themselves.

When she glances at him, she finds him staring at her. But as soon as their eyes meet, he turns away.

And Alie whirs, and jerks to the left, and turns all the way to the right, and whirs, and jerks again.

"Abby, I think you broke her," Callie says, to break the silence. But the awkward sheen on top of it stays firm.

_Maybe I did_ , she thinks, _and all the_ _better_.

Then: "You—" Alie says, and all four of them startle, and Abby rests her palm over her heart. The word is jagged, like a glitch, a tear in the side of the level, calm, robotic voice. The cylinder turns around again, until its eye is pointed straight at Abby once more. "You will have a daughter."

_Oh._

_A daughter. A little girl._

She forces herself to cross her arms; she bites her lip to keep her focus. It's just a game.

"She will have blonde hair and blue eyes. She will be beautiful, intelligent, and strong. On her eighteenth birthday, she will swallow the chip and she will fall asleep. She will sleep for ninety-seven years. She—She—She—She—"

Abby's eyes are closed. She does not remember closing them but they hurt from how fiercely she is keeping them shut, trying to hold back tears because why should she cry? It is ridiculous. It is nonsense. 

Jake's arm is around her and the glitching, the awful repetition, has finally stopped, cut off mid-sound and leaving in its wake only a sad final whir. She opens her eyes slowly and sees Marcus holding the machine in his hands, his finger still pressed against the off button on the side.

“Are you okay?” Callie asks her, only after a long moment, everyone else too nervous and too confused to speak.

Abby nods, and wipes at her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Shouldn’t have asked that question, I guess.”

“It shouldn’t have glitched like that,” Marcus argues. His is voice unnecessarily sharp in the quiet of the room. “What was it even saying: ‘she’ll take a chip’? What does that mean?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jake murmurs. He sounds as tired and as wary as Abby feels.

“I’ll take it back,” Callie decides. She takes the machine from Marcus’s hands and returns it, as well as she can, to its box. Some of the packaging is still left inside. The Alie bobs up unevenly on top of it, its single eye, dull and dead now, peering over the edge. “I’ll return it tomorrow. It’s too strange. Probably defective. I mean, who could have guessed it would go off like _that_?” 

* 

Callie does not return the Alie. She is busy. Abby is busy. The box is left on the island countertop, shoved aside against the wall where they quickly learn to pretend it is not there.

August turns into September. The temperatures drop with approaching fall. 

*

Abby wakes abruptly in the middle of the night, trying to escape from a troublesome dream. Torrents of rain lash at her windows, loud as a marching band composed entirely of drums, and a bright strike of lightning illuminates her room, just for a moment, with the clarity of the noonday sun. She stares at the wall and waits for the rumble of thunder to come. There is no chance she’ll be sleeping again anytime soon.

Slowly, she pushes herself upright, then swings her feet to the floor. The storm has brought an early cold front that brings up memories of winter, so she shuffles for her slippers and a robe before she leaves the room. She's had the robe since freshman year of college and it's starting to show its age, ratty at the edge and thin at the elbows, but she wraps it around herself all the more tightly for the comfort it brings. Her apartment feels least like home in the middle of the night.

There's a light on in the kitchen, which stops her up short with surprise. Even less expected: it's Marcus sitting at the kitchen island, perched on the edge of one of the stools, one knee bent and one foot on the floor and blinking down at the screen of his phone. He doesn't look up when Abby comes in. She stands in the doorway with her arms still holding her robe closed tight and just watches him. How worn he looks beneath his eyes, older than his years, the faintest shadow of stubble on his face and his hair mussed with sleep. The rest of the apartment is so dark, and the kitchen so bright, and he looks as out of place as she feels.

"Marcus," she says, and he looks up with wide, startled eyes.

"Oh—Abby.” He tries, for a half-second only, to smile. “Sorry."

_Sorry for what?_ she thinks. Does he think that he woke her, sitting there still as stone and just as silent, in the middle of a furious storm?

But aloud she just asks: "Are you okay?" She gestures shortly to his phone, then huddles in against herself again, shoulders up toward her ears. "Did something happen?"

The rain clatters outside, hard and hollow though muffled to Abby's ears. The kitchen doesn't have any windows and the world beyond its boundaries feels eons away. Marcus looks back at her with an uncomprehending gaze. Then he glances down at his phone and sets it abruptly down on the countertop. "Just got a call," he says, and sighs.

Abby steps forward into the room, slowly, pulls out another stool and sits down. She feels like she's carrying a heavy cement block in her stomach. The rest of her is fine; her brain has not telegraphed worry to any other part of her body, but in the very center of her it's gathering like a malignant growth. Because no one just calls to chat at two in the morning. Even most good news is better left till the light of day.

"A call," she repeats. "At this hour." 

It's no question, but he nods. His index finger traces around the edge of his phone, over and over.

"Yeah. From my boss."

"Your boss..."

Like she knows the whole hierarchy of the Justice Department. Like she knows who he reports to. Most of the time, they really don't talk about work.

Marcus nods. "Attorney General Vie."

Abby's eyebrows rise. She feels emotion coming back to her at last, like warmth to long-numb fingers after a winter walk. "The Attorney General? You're more important than I thought." Maybe it's supposed to be a joke, maybe just an observation, not even Abby knows. But she doesn’t smile.

Marcus doesn’t either, just looks up at her again. There's sadness in his expression. Not what she expected at all. She abandons her protective posture at last, unfurls herself, leans forward with her forearms on the countertop and even reaches out her fingers like she might reach for his hand. 

"Marcus." Her voice is little more than a whisper. She stares at him and dares him not to break her gaze. "Tell me the truth. What's happening?"

As soon as she hears the words in her own voice, she realizes that they've been a long time coming.

He shakes his head. Abby's seen the gesture before: the doctors she works with at the hospital, seeing the questions in their patients' families' eyes. Signaling the bad news. 

"Abby," he says, and takes her hands. "I don't want you to worry. If what might happen does, then soon it won't be our problem anymore."

At first, she doesn't understand what he means, only that her hands would be shaking if he weren't holding them so tight. Then she realizes that her eyes are wet and her lungs hurt. She realizes that she understands him perfectly. That she's understood him, that she's known, all along.

*

After Marcus returns to Callie's room, Abby sits at the kitchen island, her hands in her lap, thinking. Waiting for resolve to form. Her phone sits next to her on the countertop, right where she left it after dinner. She picks it up and turns it over in her hands, then sets it down.

Then before she can overthink, she shoves her stool back and gets to her feet, rushes to the other end of the island, pulls the Alie box toward her and wrenches out the machine. She has only the vaguest idea how to turn it on, but a few frustrated moments of fumbling and she's gotten it to chirp to life again. It gives a little whir of greeting and its blue eye pops open to stare at her.

Alive again.

She sets it on the countertop, sits down, and looks at it straight on.

"Alie," she orders, "tell me the future."

"Future mode activated."

So calm. It knows things that it shouldn't know. Things Abby needs to know now, too.

"Alie, will my daughter be okay?"

The whirring sound again, then it starts to swivel, slowly, and finally clicks into place. Abby holds her breath. Alie turns again, still thinking, then clicks to a stop and is silent. 

Perhaps she’s asked about a part of the future that has not yet been determined. Perhaps the outlook is too gray. 

Abby takes in a deep breath, scrambling for a more specific question. 

"Alie, _when_ will my daughter be born?"

Whir, click.

"In four years."

_Four years._ Anything could happen in that time. A whole world could be destroyed and built again. She feels along the edge of the concrete worry in her gut, as if she were examining a patient, clinical and cool, and she starts to understand that her apartment with the beautiful light, and the nearby convenient subway stops, and the hospital, and the Capitol—if she lives four more years she will outlive them all.

"Alie, _where_ will my daughter be born?"

Whir, click.

"In space."

Abby forces her fingers to relax. They are clenching so fiercely into fists that they hurt; both of her hands hurt. She has gone mad. She must be mad to think that the glitches of an unreliable machine, that the random words of a silly gadget's game, mean anything at all. _In space. In **space!**_ She scoffs under her breath, so angry at herself—they’re just two utterly random words smashed together to form a reply. Completely meaningless.

She stares at the blue light and it stares back at her. Not an eye. Just a blue light, shining. 

Indicating her machine is awake and aware, listening for her.

"Alie, what do you mean—what could you _possibly_ mean by—"

Her phone rings. She jumps and the tension that rattles through her bones aches deep. Another ring, and Jake's name glowing bright on the screen; she snatches it up, fumbles, accepts the call and puts the phone to her ear but doesn't even have the chance to say hello.

"Abby, listen to me."

"Jake? What—why are you calling me now—?"

Another useless question: she already knows.

"Just listen. Will you marry me?"

"What?"

On the inside, she's screaming. Incoherently screaming, wailing, an animal cry of confusion and fear, the harbinger of grief. But her body has wound itself up on springs so tight she can no longer move. Her muscles and bones and organs are just machine parts, ones she has abandoned as too useless, too lifeless, to sustain her.

"I love you," Jake is saying. She hears the same grief in his voice, a terrible urgency. "Will you marry me? Please say yes."

"Yes. Of course, yes. I love you, I'll be your wife. But please—"

"Abby. The project is a go. I'm going to text you an address, I need you to come down here, right away. I'll explain everything."

Before she can ask another question, her line goes dead.

She sets her phone down slowly. There's no time to waste and yet it takes her a few moments to learn how to inhabit her body again.

_The project is a go._

_Are you building a bunker?_

_This isn't twenty questions._

_It's a go._

_Whir, click._

*

**_Go._ **


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke Griffin is the unofficial Princess of the Ark: beloved by all, a symbol of hope for a time when humanity may return to the ground again. While exploring the ship’s back rooms on her eighteenth birthday, she meets a woman who predicts their people’s fate may be much darker, and has a novel solution in mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to thelittlefanpire for reading this chapter over and assuring me that it does, in fact, make some kind of sense, and for offering suggestions and improvements.

_The first couple to be married on the Ark were legally married on Earth. Jake Griffin, one of the engineers who designed what is now Alpha Station, wanted to bring his fiancée Abby with him when the shuttles launched. But seats were limited and, of course, only close family members could join those whose spots were already reserved. So they tied the knot in a quick ceremony, mere days before the first bombs were dropped on the American East Coast._   

_Once in space, they held a proper wedding. It was the first occasion for celebration on the Ark, even as the end of a short but devastating war raged on the planet below. Simple as the ceremony was, it felt like a fairy tale to the last ground-born generation, and Jake and Abby—good-looking, smart, emerging leaders of the new society—became like Ark royalty._   

_As time passed, and the Ark lost contact with the Earth, our people came to understand that they were the last survivors of the war. The end of humanity itself._   

_And they started having children._   

*  

When Abby wakes up alone in the middle of the night, she does not panic. This has happened before.  

She is not even surprised to find herself in total darkness, even though, at first, she considered this among the oddest of her new experiences: a room with no windows, during the day no sun, no moon at night. When she wakes, no electric-yellow streetlight glow drifting in. No dim gray-blue sheen of urban night over her bed, her furniture, her pillows.  

She slides her hand over the sheets, still warm from his body, rumpled from his absence. She closes her eyes, opens them again. No difference. Just the blackness of her eyelids or the blackness of her room.  

The ship is too adept at creating night, Abby has decided, and also not adept enough. It does too much to suck all of the light from their resting hours, but not enough to tone down its sounds when its occupants sleep. D.C. in the darkness was not completely quiet either, of course. Nor were the suburbs where she grew up, nor her college campus, nor the woods around her grandmother's house, but on Earth the background silence was peppered with nature sounds and human sounds: intermittent, unpredictable, and chaotic. People talking on the other side of the apartment wall, cars passing on the street below, crickets chirping in the grass. The ship knows no such subtleties. It sounds always the same. The same mechanical hum there just on the edge of hearing itself, turning over and over and over itself again.  

So she lies in the darkness with her eyes open and her arm outstretched, listening to the rolling sounds of the ship, not thinking. Separate from herself. Devoid of herself.  

It is an unpleasant feeling, but at least one that she can easily, now, shake off. She revels in how simple it is has become to return herself to her body, no matter the distance.  

She pulls herself up with excessive care, as if her limbs were someone else's limbs: fragile, glass limbs, prone to cracking. Presses the heel of her hand against her temple, and down under her eye—this gesture too hard, perhaps to compensate. Then she flails out her other hand until she hits the light switch by the bed, and the overhead flares on, and she has to close her eyes against the sudden, overwhelming brightness.  

When she's able to see again, first with one eye, then with both, she lets her legs fall over the edge of the bed, slides her feet into her slippers, and stands. She takes a look around the room with the curiosity of a new arrival, moves around it with a slowness that cannot be explained only by the sleep that still weighs her down.  

Her quarters feel least like home in the middle of the night.  

The bedroom is small, with barely enough room for their bed, a closet built into the wall, and a desk. The desk, really, should be outside, in the other room, with their couch and chairs and their little table, their incongruous big screen TV and the delicate plants that Abby is trying her hardest to grow. But Jake says he works best in the claustrophobia of their bedroom, and since Abby never uses the desk—it is strewn over with spare cogs and screws and half-crumpled papers covered in incomprehensible notes—she does not argue.  

Sometimes, though, she leaves her robe on the back of the desk chair, because it is convenient, and Jake does not argue.  

This is not the life she once imagined for them. To adapt to it required a certain period of mourning, not just for what was but for what can now never possibly be: the little two-story in the suburbs with the tree house in the back; or the apartment in the city; the summer vacations to the mountains or the beach; the family reunions; the road trips; or the impulse move across the country. The wide vista of possibilities stretching across the vastness of the Earth.  

But in the end, to let go wasn't as difficult as she thought it would be.  

The mind settles. Loss ingrains itself. Strength gathers and the will to survive moves her forward, looking always forward.  

For Jake, sometimes, it's harder. His optimism is like iron in him; it will not bend. And she's come to know him well enough by now to understand that he is stubborn too, like her, but less pragmatic, and that this combination of weakness is always trying to eat away a hole in his heart.  

That's how she knows where to find him.  

Alpha Station's starboard window bay.  

"Best view of Earth on the whole ship," he’d said, the first time he brought her there. It had felt romantic, at first: his arm around her and the planet down below, glinting like a jewel. There it was, the whole world like a blue and green marble, like a child's toy, a vision as false as the little toy buildings and patchwork blankets of fields she used to watch through the windows of airplanes, except on a scale so unfathomably large that the longer she stared, the less real it became. Not the Earth at all. Just a marble. And she inexplicably a giant, somehow a giant though she'd never felt so small.  

For several moments, she thought she would cry. But the tears never came, only fear and reverence and awe.  

The window bay is still a spot she treats with caution, never visiting or even passing by except when she's sure she has the fortitude. It is beautiful, of course. But it pulls her back, always backward, and she cannot afford but to advance.  

Jake is standing with his back to her, but she can picture the expression on his face: distant and overcome. She's quiet in her approach and he doesn't turn around. Still he recognizes her presence.  

"Clarke keeping you up?" he asks.  

Abby smiles, despite herself. "You've really gotten attached to that name, haven't you?" She puts her hand on his arm, as gentle as if he were an animal she was nervous not to scare.   

"Maybe a little." He doesn't put his arm around her, just keeps his arms crossed against his chest, but he does put his hand on top of her hand. Then, at last, he glances down at her. "Do you not like it?"  

At first, he was trying out a different name every day. Lucy. Irene. Olivia. Catherine. Victoria. But for the last three weeks, every time he mentions their daughter, he calls her _Clarke_.  

"No, I do." As much as any other name, although she will admit that, perhaps by repetition alone, it feels more real to her than the others. Her daughter, Clarke. Her daughter: her tether to herself, a tangible future in a surreal, precarious life. Her daughter, stranger than the proximity of space outside the window: a bit of herself and of Jake, a new person slowly forming, growing within her. "I do," she says again, then tries for teasing: "Does this mean you've started hoping for a boy?"   

"No." He looks down at her, and his expression is more defensive than she'd thought it would be. He forces it to soften, and then curls his arm around her shoulders at last and pulls her close. She tucks in her chin. He rests his on top of her head. This was one of the first things that attracted her to him: how tall he was, and how broad in the shoulders; a strong man with a gentle face. "Clarke could be a girl's name. And it sounds nice, doesn't it? Clarke Griffin."   

"Clarke Griffin," Abby repeats, low.   

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the Earth. From this distance, it is perfect. From this distance, it looks as pristine and untouched as if human beings had never set foot upon it.   

She can feel Clarke kicking.   

And for a moment, she's so sure that she is about to laugh, that she does not even notice she has started to cry.  

*  

_Each child born on the Ark was celebrated, as proof that humanity would survive, and perhaps even grow, through its dark space age. But none was more warmly welcomed than the Griffins’ daughter, Clarke._

_If her parents were akin to a King and Queen, then she was the Ark’s Princess: beloved from the moment of her birth, even more so as she grew. As smart and curious as she was adventurous and bold, she easily disarmed all of the adults around her. They gave her gifts, took her on tours around the stations, and encouraged her to wander freely, far from her parents’ watchful eyes on Alpha. Nothing, or almost nothing, was forbidden to her._    

_At that time, some people still believed that humanity would be able to return to Earth in a generation. Clarke was their hope for the future._    

*  

Few noises exist that can interrupt Abby's concentration when she's sorting through her patient files. Background chatter or conversation, footsteps out in the hall, her husband tinkering with some new experiment or project at his desk: all as insubstantial as waves on a distant shore, a white hum of noise that she simply tunes out. But when she hears "Mom!" and then, "MomMomMomMomMom," and a quick burst of stampeding sockfeet across the room, as loud as a herd of horses and heavy as elephants' steps, she always snaps immediately back to herself. She looks up just in time to move out of the way.  

Clarke jumps over the ends of the sofa, both hands on the arm for leverage, and launches herself onto the middle cushion, turning her wide, bright grin up. Abby sets her tablet down on her knees.  

Her daughter would not wholly understand the stampeding herd analogy, as she has never seen a living animal in her life. She adores flipping through pictures of them, though. Horses are her favorites. "When I get to Earth, I'll learn to ride one,” she likes to say. “That's how I'll get around. I'll ride all over the place on my horse."  

And Abby opens her mouth to tell her _Oh Clarke, that may not be possible_ , and Jake stops her, every time, before she can say a word. His hand squeezing her hand: _Let her have this fantasy. Let her **believe**._   

Jake knows better than to cling to wild and impossible hopes, himself. He knows too much and is too rational. But he wishes he could believe; he sees it as a blessing that Clarke can.   

He is not wholly to blame for this bubble of optimism, the one Abby cannot bring herself to break. It's the other adults on the ship, those without children especially, the ones who gather on the observation decks to stare down at the Earth and swear, and _swear_ , they'll walk upon the ground again, or that, at least, they’ll know someone who will. They’re the ones who fill Clarke’s head with these ideas.  

"Mom," Clarke says again, a wild clear exclamation cutting through Abby's thoughts. Abby looks down at her and smiles, though more gently, a faint mirror of the expression on her daughter's face. "Mom, look what Mrs. Jaha made for me." Perched on top of her head is a crown, carefully crafted of wire and decorated with spare nuts and gears, which she gently takes off and holds out for her mother to see. "She said I look like a princess when I wear it. It's for my birthday."  

Yes, her birthday. Eight years old today.   

(On Earth, it is autumn. Leaves falling from the trees in flutters of red and orange and gold.)  

Abby holds the crown gingerly, admiring it, irrationally afraid that it may fall apart in her hands. "It's beautiful," she says. "That was very kind of her, to make you this."  

"I know," Clarke agrees cheerily. She holds out her hands, and Abby returns the makeshift crown to her. She balances it again atop her head. "I want to wear it every day. I'm afraid it might fall off, though."  

"How about you wear it today," Abby suggests, "and then you can leave it in your room and just look at it instead?" Clarke's room is a mess of her own creations and the variety of gifts well-meaning neighbors have given to her over the years. Only the Ark's storage spaces and the market are more crowded or more diverse. Sometimes Abby thinks it is her favorite spot on the whole ship.  

"Yeah, okay." Clarke nods, and the crown slips down over her eyes. She pushes it back into place. "That's a good idea, Mom." She looks down at her hands, then at Abby's tablet, only her eyes darting as she is careful to keep her head steady and the crown in place. Her fingers twist together in her lap. A thoughtful look has shaded over her face.  

"Something else on your mind, Clarke?" Abby asks.  

"Mmmm—yeah—do you think we could look at the maps again?" She sounds almost embarrassed, even though, or perhaps because, she asks this question all the time. Jake will tease her about it sometimes: _the maps again, Clarke, AGAIN?_ But his voice is so loud and distorted with the laughter bubbling just beneath its surface—and sometimes as he's joking, he'll fall to tickling her until she tumbles back against the couch cushions, her foot kicking up, any attempt at answer lost in waves of giggles—that not even a child would think to take offense.  

Abby never treats the question that way. Instead, she saves the latest changes to her patient notes and then slides them away and off the screen, and gestures for Clarke to come close. "The maps? I think I can find them somewhere in here," she says, as Clarke curls up against her side.  

The Ark computers store a massive amount of information about Earth: its history, geography, geology, weather, former cities, former borders, plants, animals, languages, tools, innovations, peoples, as well as whatever data on its current condition the stations are able to pick up. Some of the information is classified, and a subset of that perhaps so deeply so that residents like Abby do not even know that it exists. But the majority of this treasure trove of data is accessible from any tablet or screen on the ship. Within this public collection is a large, searchable database of maps.  

Even more than the photographs of forests, city streets, or animals, even more than the reproductions of famous works of art, even more than the wealth of medical and engineering information she insists that her parents explain, Clarke adores the maps.  

"Where would you like to go first?" Abby asks, pulling up the database main page as Clarke settles in.  

"America," she answers. Sometimes she has to think a moment before she decides, lips pursed tight and her eyes closed, like she's traveling the globe with her mind's eye, watching for the perfect spot to alight. But not today. "Show me where you and Daddy lived before the war."  

The word _war_ is a heartbreak when spoken in her child's voice.  

"All right," Abby agrees, her own voice level and clear. She brings up North America, then focuses in, closer, on the United States, and then the East Coast, until the borders of the states appear: Maryland and Virginia and Pennsylvania picked out in tiny dotted lines. "We lived here," she says, and pokes a spot on the screen. Beneath her fingertip, a red dot jumps into place, and the name of the city pops up in clear black type over the Atlantic.  

"Washington D.C.," Clarke reads.  

"Yes. The capitol of the whole country. Where all the leaders lived."  

"Like the Ark Council."  

"Yes. Although we didn't have a Council in America. We had a President, and a Congress, and courts."  

Clarke knows all of this, but still she listens intently, mesmerized not by the meanings of the words but by their cadences. She nods along if she were listening to an oft-repeated bedtime story or a fairy tale. A narrative that no longer surprises, but always comforts.  

"How far was it," she asks now, "from there to where you grew up?"  

"Where _I_ grew up? Well, I'm from up here." Abby zooms out slightly, enough to bring New England into the frame, and points. "It would take several hours by car. Probably about eight."  

"Eight hours?" Clarke's eyes widen, and she glances between her mother and the map on the tablet screen. "That's a long time. And it's not even that far, it's like..." She hovers her fingers over the image, careful not to touch, measuring the distance in approximate inches. Then she holds her hand up for her mother to see. "It's like this much. It's not as far as… Africa. Or China."  

"No," Abby agrees, "it's not. From Washington to my home town isn't even as far as from Washington to the other side of America. But Earth is vast, Clarke. So much larger than it looks on the map. So much larger—"  

_Than anything you've ever known, or anything you could imagine._   

A lump forms in her throat, the beginning of unexpected tears. Clarke is staring at the map again and doesn't seem to notice the catch in Abby's voice. Gently, she shifts the image in reverse again, so that they are staring first at the whole country, then the continent, then all of the continents at once. "Vast," she repeats. "Bigger than the Ark."  

It isn’t a question, but still Abby nods. "Much, much bigger.”  

Clarke leans back against Abby's chest. Abby tightens the grip of her arm around her and starts to rock her, without thinking, back and forth. She rests her cheek against Clarke's hair, accidentally knocking her crown slightly askew.  

"I think it must be amazing," Clarke whispers.  

"It was," Abby murmurs. "It is. Absolutely amazing in so many ways."  

*  

_Just as Clarke grew and matured, so did the Ark around her. The stations were renamed and took on new, specialized roles. The Council formed. New laws were debated and put into place. Years passed, and the first sky-born children approached adulthood. They began new jobs and moved out of their parents' quarters; some got married and contemplated having children of their own._   

_At sixteen, Clarke began her apprenticeship in medical, in the hope of one day becoming a doctor like her mother. She excelled in her new position, learning quickly and gaining more confidence in her abilities every day. Despite the changes both around her and within her, though, some constants remained. She was still the princess of the Ark in her neighbors' eyes. And she was still just as curious, as stubborn, and as adventurous as ever._   

*  

Not long past noon on her eighteenth birthday, Clarke slips away from medical and returns to her own quarters on Alpha. She has an hour left still on her shift, and in any other circumstance, she would stay at least that long—longer, if she were needed. But her mother has been acting oddly all morning, hovering around her as if it were her first day and she couldn't even be trusted to change a bandage or check a pulse. This in turn has transformed the normally harried, but exciting, atmosphere of medical into a stifling cage.  

She breathes better in the hallway. Even better still when she's in her own room with the door closed.  

So far today, twenty-five people have wished her a happy birthday, and she has smiled and thanked each one. Engaged in light, airy small talk with a few. Said _yes, of course, I'm having a wonderful day_ , over and over. She's always known how to say the right thing. But now as she lies on her back in bed and stares up at her ceiling, she wonders what it is about the day that has felt so subtly but inescapably off.  

Her mother's strange behavior is part of it.  

But so are the arguments she's overheard in the commons and the rumors that hop and trill through the cafeteria, sounding like her father describes birdsong on Earth. _At this rate_ is a common refrain. Right along with _how much longer until_ and _what do you think they know—?_   

By _they_ , the whisperers usually mean _The Council_. But sometimes Clarke thinks they mean _the kids_.  

"Not really a kid anymore, though, are you?" she murmurs up at the ceiling. “Not really.”  

Neither the ceiling, nor the panorama of trees and lakes sketched across it, provides any sort of answer, and she sighs. The landscape was a gift to herself when she turned fifteen. Her father helped her move her furniture out of the way so that she could draw it directly over her bed, while her mother stood in the doorway watching them, a fond expression, distant with longing, on her face.  

"How does it look?" Clarke asked, when she was done, and Abby put her hand over her heart and said, "Like home."  

"Like home," Clarke repeats, now. "Except really my home is the Ark. Or space." That doesn't sound right, but neither do the trees and the water and the little sprigs of grass look right, look like anywhere she could ever call _hers_. And maybe that, she decides, is the source of this growing unease. Not her birthday, or her mother, or anything specific to her at all, but that the Ark is home and now home is shifting under her feet. 

If the rumors are true, it will keep shifting.

If the rumors are true, it will start to seem smaller and smaller, a crowded ship of watchful eyes, the limits of the universe contracting ever in. 

This thought is enough to make her pulse jump at her throat. A sense of rigidity creeps over her, slowly freezing her limbs: the defensive response of prey, she imagines, akin to the full-body denial that comes as the immediate aftershock of bad news. Except that she is breaking this news to herself, alone in her room, listening to her own shaky exhales of breath and to the silence.  

_This is home, this is home for all of us, this is all there is, this is all there will ever be—_   

The Ark has never felt claustrophobic before. But now she must force herself to sit up, hand against her chest, force herself to breathe.  

She checks the time. Neither of her parents will be home for a half hour yet, at least. If she can just take a walk, take a bit of a look around, remind herself how vast their multi-station spaceship really is, the tiny little pinpricks of unease marching up the back of her neck might stop. She'll drop into herself again; the world will seem normal, as it always has before.  

_Maybe this is what being an adult is like_ , Clarke jokes to herself, as she keys in the code to lock the door of the Griffins' quarters behind her. _A constant anxiety about the future. It seems like it will be a lot of fun._   

Because she's not much in the mood for chitchat or any more birthday well wishes, she leaves Alpha at the first chance she gets, and takes the least-used paths to wander the station halls. Mecha is one of her favorites: it's home mostly to engineers and mechanics, who walk with such purpose and seem, always, so confident. For a while, she thought she might become one, like her father. He was certainly fond of the idea. _My daughter's a problem solver_ , he'd say, when she was little and she’d sit on his lap and work out puzzles and brainteasers with him. But the mysteries of machinery and the hard, unyielding, physical stuff of the ship itself never sparked her interest as much as the mysteries of the human body did, the mysteries of humans themselves.   

At the far end of Mecha, where it connects to Tesla and to Farm, there's a door that Clarke has never been able to open. She asked about it once, when she was five years old. She was walking home with her father from his old office in this part of the ship, and the jarring black-and-yellow striped border of the sealed-off entrance caught her eye. She pulled away from Jake's grasp and pressed her small palm against the bright new paint and asked, _What does this mean?_    

Her father answered that it was a warning. _Do not enter here,_ he said.   

_Why?_ she asked. It was her favorite word at the time, and her father's favorite part of her vocabulary, too. But this time instead of smiling fondly and explaining, in that way that only her dad ever could, he faltered. Then he picked her right up and said:   

_Because it's dangerous. And not for little girls like you. So you just stay away from there, all right?_    

It was the first time Clarke had ever seen her father look frightened, and the aspect was so foreign to her that she, in turn, felt a wave of uncertainty and fear threaten her. She still remembers it perfectly: the cold pricking feel of it along her skin. She remembers the scratch of his stubble against her skin as he kissed her forehead. And she remembers realizing, later, the one time she tried the door and found it locked against even her best attempts at entry, that Jake was not frightened because he knew what was hidden behind that flashy warning sign. He was afraid because it was a mystery to him, too.   

All of the yellow, and most of the black, too, has been chipped away from the door by now. This isn't normal wear and tear, Clarke thinks, as she runs her fingertips against the seam where the door fits snugly into the wall. It's been barely more than dozen years, after all. For her, that is almost a lifetime, but the citizenry of the Ark keeps their home in good repair. No. The door has been made unobtrusive by design, and the scratches in its gray paint are nothing short of camouflage.   

Makes sense, of course. Blaring warning signs create curiosity. But only someone looking carefully at this particular panel would guess that it was a door at all, and not just another piece of the hallway, indistinguishable from every other panel in every other hallway in the ship. Clarke herself has passed by it hundreds of times but hasn't given it a second thought in years. Except, for some reason, today—   

Maybe she's just especially desperate for distraction. Maybe it is only coincidence. Still, she's somehow sure that if she can press her shoulder just so against the seam, if she can find somehow the right degree of force to trigger its secret lock, that it will, just like that, yield to her efforts and slide away.   

Just… like… _that_.  

It opens little more than a crack at first, stubbornly barely budging even against the full force of her weight. But it's enough. Enough to assure her that she is not losing her mind, at least, and enough to pique her flagging curiosity again.   

She leans in close and tries to peer inside but discerns nothing in the utter dark. Pulls back with a sigh. Then glances over her shoulder, to make sure the hallway is still deserted, and tries again. This time, she can at least curl her fingers around the door's edge, and with time and effort, the door slides back into the wall, inch by creaking inch, until it is open just wide enough for her to slip through.  

Clarke doesn't hesitate before she steps over the threshold, allowing herself to be swallowed up by the blackness on the other side. Still, her father’s voice seems to follow her, echoing, a warning, in her head: _It's dangerous...stay away from here, all right?_ It repeats and repeats until the phrases have no meaning, until the words are just syllables, like a half-forgotten song flitting there on the edge of her memory. Easy to ignore as she searches for a light. She finds none, but her eyes adjust to the dimness—the complete black of the room turned a deep gray from the bit of hallway light that seeps in—and she is able, eventually, to take her new surroundings in.  

Nothing very interesting, though, she decides. She’s disappointed despite herself as she stares at the boxes, bits of broken machinery and scrap, the detritus stacked up haphazardly around her. Her discovery is nothing, a sad anticlimax, although just a moment before, her heart had been pounding as she devoted herself to the task of sneaking in. Worse, it had been beating not just from physical exertion but from fear, from the sneaking sense that something was waiting for her there on the other side, there in the pitch blackness, invisible and waiting just for her—  

Now she sees that that was only her mind playing a trick on her, mixing up a vague childhood memory with some ancient human fear of the night, spicing the whole brew with a good girl's guilt over breaking the rules—well, not like she hasn't broken them before. Maybe even those old memories have been distorted with time. Maybe her father just didn't want her playing among the junk piles he knew would be building up here, crap too useless even for the market, but full of dangers for a careless little kid. She feels just as silly as a child for falling for the last mystery left to her on the Ark, for thinking that some unknown still lurked in this ship she knows so well.  

She spends a few minutes, anyway, wandering deeper into the room, poking into boxes and picking up broken machine parts, wasting time and allowing herself some distraction from the intrusive thoughts of the day. Finding pockets of calm on the Ark is harder than it used to be: too many little kids running around, screaming infants in the common rooms, expanding classes for the five- and six- and seven-year old set, always trooping on field trips through Alpha and Go-Sci and Mecha. A few moments of complete silence and solitude seem to her both precious and well-earned.  

It is in this utter silence that she hears it. A small abrupt chiming like glass hitting the ground.  

Impossible. She stands completely still, limbs frozen but her heart booming against her ribs, listening for another sound to follow the first. Impossible, impossible, impossible, she tells herself. If she really heard what she thought she heard, then that means…she isn’t alone.  

All she can hear now is the hard, rough rush of air into and out of her lungs.  

The noise, if it was not just a hallucination or some random scurry in the dark, came not from the direction of the hallway but from her other side, from deep within the darkness of the ship. Clarke turns toward it slowly. Then takes a tentative step closer, and another. Now she can see, and it is enough to stop altogether the ragged breath that just a moment ago thundered in her ears, that there is a source of light on this side, too. The thinnest sliver of light outlining a door, so far removed from the one she first entered that from this distance, she cannot see even a crack of light from the main corridor.  

She could turn back now. She could run away with a clatter loud enough to alert whoever is there on the other side, and not care. She could run until she’d reached the safety of Mecha and then keep going, to the familiarity of Alpha, and she'd be fine. But this option never truly registers. It pings somewhere in the distance of her thoughts, like the memory of her father's voice warning her away when she was only five, as gauzy and as distant as a childhood recollection or a dream. She does not choose to ignore it so much as she does not place upon it the importance of an option to be ignored. She no more makes the choice to approach that slight rectangle outlined in light than she makes the choice to breathe or to keep her own heart beating.  

The closer she gets, the more sounds she hears: first a light cursing in a female voice, indistinguishable words huffed out beneath breath, and something like the swish of a rag and a crackle of glass crunching up against glass. Footsteps, quick and brisk, and a long, heavy sigh.   

The door is slightly open: just a crack, but enough for Clarke to step up close and, breath held, hold her face close to the light and look inside.  

She is staring into a vast room of gleaming white. Never in her eighteen years has she seen such whiteness, beautiful and nearly unbroken, like the snowscapes in the Ark's Earth photography database, shocking to the eye. She feels her pupil, blown up from her minutes spent in the dark, contracting quickly at the sudden invasion of light.   

Now she is better able to take in the room for what it is: a lab. It is reminiscent of the other laboratories on the Ark, except for the color, and this scrap of familiarity softens her shock just a bit. Makes it bearable. At the center of the lab is a long, white table. It is dominated by a large computer screen but has strewn across it various other scientific paraphernalia: a microscope, several test tubes, a small gray rack stacked with petri dishes, the contents of which Clarke cannot see.   

Sitting at the table, wearing a long white lab coat and gloves, staring for the moment not at her work but at the far distant end of the room as if deep in thought, is a woman. Clarke has never seen her before. She is about the same age as Clarke's parents, maybe a few years younger—a member of the Grounder-generation, though, for sure. Her face is beautiful but worn, she wears her hair in a tight ponytail, and she sits with her back straight and her shoulders square, her hands in her lap. Clarke can't see them from this angle, with the table in the way, but she pictures them folded neatly together.  

As she watches, the woman takes a deep breath, sighs, and then, as if shaking off her thoughts, pushes her stool back from the table and stands. She picks up one of petri dishes from the row in front of her. Whatever is inside the dish, it's too small for Clarke to see, but she does her best to crane her neck and make it out. Her curiosity is creeping up within her, taunting her and goading her. Building itself up to something more powerful than her fear. She angles her body, moving to the side as if this would help—and in the process, stubs her toe with unexpected force against the door.  

She hisses in a sharp breath.   

That is enough. The woman snaps her gaze to the door, her own body as still as Clarke's statue-frame, her eyes wide. Clarke bites down on her lip and closes her eyes tight. If she is just quiet enough, she thinks, and completely motionless, holds her breath and keeps calm the rampant hammering of her pulse in her own ears, then she will not be found. She just has to be quiet. Completely and utterly _quiet_ and still.  

"Who's there?" the woman asks. Her voice is sharp and echoes in the lab and Clarke cannot help but wince.   

She opens one eye just a sliver.  

The woman is facing the door, still holding the petri dish in her hand.  

"I know someone's there," she says, and takes a step toward Clarke's hiding place. "If you don't want me to find you, you should run now."  

_Run now. Just run now, she'll let you get away, she's giving you a way out, just run—_   

Instead, Clarke straightens up and squares her shoulders. When the woman opens the door, she is facing her clear-eyed and unafraid.  

The woman tilts her head to the side, the slightest of smiles twitching up at the corner of her lips. Amused, perhaps, at Clarke's bravery, or her foolishness. Clarke feels a slight tremor daring her hands to shake and a lump beginning to form in her throat. But she won’t give this stranger the satisfaction of seeing her fear. When the woman steps back and gestures for Clarke to come in, she follows.   

The lab is so quiet and so cavernous that she can hear the slick _thwack_ of her shoes, too loud against the floor with each step.  

"I'm Becca," the woman announces, as she returns to her place at the table and sets the petri dish back on its rack. She lets her hands rest against the table's edge with an unnatural lightness, as if, no less agitated than when she first heard Clarke behind the door, nevertheless she wishes to project an attitude of relaxation and calm. 

"Clarke," she answers briefly, and Becca smiles.  

"Clarke," she repeats. She seems to relish the name, as if it were the first she's had the pleasure of speaking aloud in years. Then she half-turns, and her gaze settles on Clarke's face with a scientist's patient curiosity. As she speaks, her words build up upon themselves with unnatural speed, all but tripping one over the next. "Clarke... Yes. I've been wondering when someone would stop by the lab again. I admit, I thought it would be someone like Chancellor Torman—"  

"Green."  

Becca closes her mouth abruptly. She tilts her head: a minute and careful, almost birdlike, gesture.   

"Anna Rae Green," Clarke says, "is the Chancellor now."  

"Oh." Becca turns away again, sits back down on her stool with her hands in her lap once more. "Well. Time does continue on, of course."  

Clarke lets the tips of her own fingers rest carefully against the tabletop, so tentatively and so gingerly she wonders if she has yet accepted that everything she is seeing is real. Up close now, she can look at the rack of petri dishes at last. Each one holds a single object: a shining dark blue hexagon stamped with an infinity sign, roughly the size of a computer chip. What they could possibly be, she has no idea. They are oddly beautiful, gleaming beneath the overhead lights, and yet the sight of them makes her uneasy, makes her back stiffen and her stomach muscles clench.  

"What are you doing here?" Clarke asks, abruptly enough to startle even herself, into the silence that Becca has yet to reclaim. "What is all of this?"  

"It's my lab," Becca answers. "I designed it myself, on Earth.” Another half-smile, this one tinged by the sad expression around her eyes, flits across her face. "I've been working here for such a long time... But of course, soon time will cease to mean what it means now."  

"What does that mean?" Clarke's brow furrows. A rolling, nauseous feeling builds slowly, steadily, in her gut, as she looks at the neat rows of shining hexagons again. Except for the destabilizing pain of this nausea, she feels alert, on guard, as if threatened. "What sort of work are you doing here? What are these?”  

Becca sighs. She opens her mouth a few times, just on the brink of an answer, then closes it again. Clarke wonders how long it's been since she had to explain herself to anyone.   

Finally, she says, "They’re the future. They’re... They are the gateway to our paradise."  

She's looking up at Clarke with an expression of pure, unguarded hope, but Clarke's own throat is dry, and she feels frozen beyond movement, let alone speech. When Becca sees that she won't be getting an immediate response, she tries again:  

"I call it the City of Light. It's... a bit hard to explain. I'd say it's a computer program, but that's much too simplistic. It’s like virtual reality, but so complete and so real that it could easily take the place of reality itself. That's the goal. These," she gestures to the petri dishes, "these chips are the keys to the City. If you take one—put it on your tongue and let it dissolve—you'll...you'll merge with the program, in a sense. You'll enter the City of Light, you’ll be one with it—you'll be able to live there, not just for the rest of your body’s life but for as long as the program exists. Which, given the capabilities of this ship and its ability to draw solar power, is…almost eternity. At least—until the sun itself burns out."  

Caught up in this flurry of speaking, Becca slowly starts to lean forward, closer and closer, and then gets to her feet and steps into Clarke's space. Her eyes gleam as brightly as the hexagons in their dishes. Spots of color sit high on her cheeks.  

For Clarke, the words are little more than meaningless syllables because—how could any of that be true? A virtual paradise where humans live forever? A body merging with—not even a machine, but a series of code? A mind, a whole person, caught up within a pattern of zeroes and ones?   

And if that were to happen, would the mind itself cease to exist? Becca is telling her about life, but wouldn't her creation, if it were real, rather be a sort of death? 

And if a death, to what sort of afterlife would it lead—? 

Clarke finds herself reaching out for one of the chips, drawn to them with a magnetic fascination. Then she sees what she’s doing and pulls her hand abruptly away. No. _No_ , she reminds herself, and shoves her hands safely into her pockets. The hexagons are beautiful, the idea of them repulsive, and the way that Becca stares at her, bright-eyed and unflinching, with wild eagerness, so distracts and distorts that Clarke can barely think. 

"It's okay to be shocked," Becca says, leaning out of Clarke’s space again, a deliberate calm returning to her voice. "I know it's a lot to take in. Please," she perches on the edge of her stool again, "ask me whatever questions you want."  

“What does it look like?” Clarke asks, quick. She’s not sure that she believes, yet, but she needs to keep talking and keep listening. She needs a focus for her dangerously unstable thoughts. “You said it was a virtual reality. But a virtual version of _what_?”  

“Of Earth. Earth before the war.”  

As soon as she says it, Clarke realizes how silly her question was. What else could paradise be to a group of human beings floating through space? And yet—the cool impersonal nature of the virtual, artificial scenes reflected back from computer screens—Clarke already knows these things. They are already her Earth, the only version of it she has ever known. She imagines herself hopping inside the maps she pored over as a child, tilting back her head to take in life-sized 3D models of mountaintops or city skyscrapers or tall forest pines. It is an interesting idea. But not the heavenly vision that Becca seems to think it is.  

"I'd rather wait and return to the real thing," she says. Her voice, too, a studied calm. "Even if it is a post-war Earth."  

"And if that isn't possible?"   

Becca is looking at her now with a new sharpness to her gaze, a biting accusation, and Clarke fights the instinct to step back. She doesn't answer, and Becca continues:   

"The City of Light looks just like the Earth I used to know, Clarke. But that Earth is gone, and nothing but an irradiated wasteland exists in its place." She seems on the edge of saying something more, then takes in a deep, shaking breath instead. A steadying breath, as she pushes back her shoulders and dips down her chin. Then she turns away so she's staring at her computer screen. Clarke watches her profile, still tense with curiosity and wariness both.   

"You must be smart,” Becca continues, “if you figured out how to get here. Brave, too. And you sound sure that you'll be going back to the ground again, so I guess you must be optimistic as well. I used to be like you, Clarke. I had so much _optimism_ about the world. I thought my life's work would be to make people happier. Can you believe that?” She smiles, that sad smile again. “Happiness, that was the luxury I was so focused on. I thought I could use computers, V.R., A.I. even, to make people more content and more fulfilled in their lives. Then I saw the war coming." Her gaze, drifting slowly upward as if to a sky she cannot see, falls again to where her hands rest lightly against the table's edge. "I realized that imperfect happiness was the least of our problems. So I got a job working on the Ark—what would eventually become the Ark. I was only twenty-three, but I designed most of the ship's computer system. I focused on the mission and I thought, just like everyone else thought, that we'd spend a few years in space and then return when it was safe, and we'd rebuild everything to what it was—"  

She cuts herself off abruptly, and Clarke is convinced for a moment that she is choking back tears. But then she sees that Becca's hands have curled into tight fists and her nails are digging into her skin, and Clarke understands that she is angry. The pause stretches out and out; the machine hum of the ship in the background seems to grow and grow, like a buzzing in the ear. Clarke lets it. She can barely breathe, she aches to interrupt, but she forces herself to wait.  

Finally, Becca turns toward her again. "I've seen all of the Ark's research on human survivability on the post-war surface, Clarke. It is uniform in its conclusions. At a minimum, it will take two hundred years for the radiation on Earth to drop to suitable levels. And that is the _optimistic_ view."  

Clarke's tongue is sticking to the roof of her mouth. She swallows hard and manages, her words stiff and dry, "That's not what I've heard."  

Except, in some form, in whispered rumors and crumbling half-heard hints in the common rooms, the cafeteria, the market, she has. Never confirmed. Never truly believed. A creeping nightmare that follows her sometimes even when she wakes. 

_This is home, this is home for all of us, this is all there is, this is all there will ever be—_   

Becca's gaze softens, as if she felt bad for Clarke, as if she were deeply moved by her own pity. "Of course it isn't. If the general population heard the truth, there would be riots in the halls."  

"So how do you—?"  

"I told you. I designed the computer system." She taps the edge of her screen lightly. "There isn't any information, anywhere on the Ark's database, that I don't have access to."  

“You know I could walk right out of here and tell that to the Council,” Clarke reminds her. “Not just that you’re reading classified information, either. I could tell them about all of this: your secret lab and all your plans—”  

“They already know.” Her expression is still gentle, but there is disappointment in it now. _Oh little girl_ , she might be thinking. _I thought you were smart_. “Of course they know, Clarke. They stuck me back here and out of the way because they didn’t think my work will ever come to anything but—” She lets out a soft breath, glances over to the neat array of chips sitting between them. “They were wrong.” Her voice is so wistful, so quiet, that Clarke almost doesn’t hear the deep note of pride in it. “They were wrong.”  

Wrong about Becca’s work, Clarke reminds herself. Wrong about the virtual reality paradise she is promising. Wrong about the wild experiment they never thought would come to fruition. 

But what she hears there in the spaces between words, the quiet pauses, is _wrong about Earth_. Everything she has so long wanted to believe, cracking up and threatening to collapse now for years, so slowly that she could ignore the signs, seems set now to fall completely apart. It will fall apart, if she believes, and a small voice is telling her: it all fits— 

Her knees feel suddenly weak, and she has to sit down on the nearest stool before she buckles. She could bring up the Council again. Or the rest of the Ark’s residents. Or she could ask for proof or express a stronger disbelief. She wills herself to do any of these things, to do something other than sit and stare at the perfect little hexagons, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, taunting her with a symbol of eternity.   

She feels Becca’s hand touch her hand and startles, breath caught in her throat as she looks up.  

“The idea worries you, doesn’t it?” Becca asks. “That’s why you’re trying to distance yourself from it by worrying about the Council and the _rules_.” She smiles, a conspiratorial smile as if to say _and we both know what people like you and I think of the rules_. “Don’t try to avoid this. Look at it squarely. The problem is simple. The solution doesn’t need to be frightening.” 

Clarke almost laughs, a derisive, angry snort that she swallows down only with difficulty. She snatches her hand away sharply instead, and snaps, “Don’t. You’ve seen Earth. I haven’t. Maybe it’s easier for you to give it up—” 

“It’s harder.” The gentle, almost hypnotic tone of a moment before is gone, replaced with something hard and tinged deep with disdain. “But I’ve accepted the truth. Earth is not an option for us. The planet I remember, the one your parents have probably told you about, shown you pictures of, encouraged you to imagine—it's a fairy tale.”  

“And your City of Light isn’t?” Clarke counters. The ache in her stomach is worsening, and her words are as much a rebuke to her own body as they are to Becca, to the taunting blue hexagons, to the tempting whisper of forever, and its egregious price. Maybe she can mourn Earth. Maybe if Becca would just let her _think_ she could—but Becca doesn’t want her to mourn. 

“It’s as real as the Ark,” Becca answers. “As real as this computer, this lab. As real as your own mind. A life there will feel as authentic as your life now—maybe even more so, if you can admit that living in space is hardly living.” Her tone is edged now with bitterness, and when she picks up one of her petri dishes and sets it in front of Clarke, the moment feels anticlimactic, the offer their whole conversation has revolved around now in the fore, stark and simple and unbelievable, and true. 

“I completed work on the City of Light several days ago,” Becca tells her. She sounds exhausted, and Clarke recognizes the gesture for what it is, a sort of capitulation. A laying of her cards upon the table. “I’ve only been debating how to bring my work to the rest of the Ark. But now you’re here. That must mean something. So I’m offering the key to you first. It’s right here if you want it.” 

Clarke reaches out, despite herself, and traces her fingertip along the edge of the petri dish. 

She doesn’t trust Becca. Not entirely. What she’s said about Earth, Clarke must admit, is probably true. What she’s said about the City remains unbelievable. And even if true— 

If true, this is her only chance to see Earth, in any way, in any form. To walk on the ground, smell the air, see the animals—to run her hand across the uneven bark of real trees—these have been her deepest desires since she was old enough to dream. And yet in eighteen years she’s never asked herself: what would she give up for even the chance to kneel in the dirt and dig her fingers through the soil? 

“And what about the rest of the Ark?” she asks. Her own voice sounds distant to her ears. Still she forces herself to look up. “Some people will say no. Will you force them?” 

"No." Becca shakes her head. Her own tone is calm and the expression on her face almost hurt, as if they were close friends, as if Clarke should somehow know her so much better than that. "I do value free will. Anyone who refuses is free to continue living in their physical bodies on the Ark. Although I predict,” she adds, “that over time, that prospect will become less and less appealing."  

"What's that supposed to mean?" Clarke frowns. A pinched, painful feeling is constricting her lungs, but she does not stop the movement of her fingertip along the side of the dish. 

"It means," Becca answers, sighing, "that the reality of long-term life in space is going to assert itself, strongly, and more rapidly than many on this ship want to believe. The people are still optimistic, aren't they? Just as you are? That we'll return to the ground?"  

"Yes, of course—”—for the most part—“—that was always the plan—"  

"The best-case scenario plan. The engineers who designed the Ark always knew it might have to sustain humanity for generations. It is possible...but it won't be pleasant, especially as the population grows. The longer we live here, the more difficult it will become. The ship will become crowded. Our resources will become strained. The people will become frustrated and tensions will rise. And the Ark leadership will respond. Rations, population controls, a more punitive criminal system, an armed police force, a more powerful Council—some of this is already starting, isn't it?"  

Clarke doesn't answer, but she doesn't look away, either. She flicks her gaze across Becca's face, trying to discern more than she herself gives away.  

What she sees is only acceptance, and a soft, resigned, sadness.  

"The Council has been passing new laws, hasn't it? Or at least proposing them?"  

"Housing is more tightly controlled," Clarke admits. "And there is some...minimal rationing."  

"And you hardly even notice it?" Becca tilts her head. Clarke has to turn away, this time; she cannot breathe beneath the pity and the sad, self-righteous vindication there. "So far. Is there a prison on the Ark yet?"  

Clarke hesitates. "A few cells. On Sky Station. But—that's always been true."  

"Not at first. You’re too young to remember but at the very beginning...we did have higher hopes for ourselves than this."  

She scrapes her stool back abruptly, paces to the far end of the table, pauses and then turns back. Clarke watches her. She watches with a cold detachment that makes her wonder, again, if this is somehow a dream. But of course it is real. It is all real. And she feels so frigid and so stiff because, like the animals that once lived on the surface, playing dead before predators, millions of years of instincts have taught her that this is how to keep herself safe. But the truth is seeping in deeper and deeper, an acid corroding all of the untruths and desperate fantasies she’s lived with for eighteen years.  

Fantasies that she’s always known were fantasies.   

"So what you’re telling me," she says, slowly, one part of her speaking while another deep-hidden part listens, still waiting, still frozen, “is that there's no hope?"  

"No. There is hope." Becca takes a step back toward her, and the sound of her shoe hitting the floor sounds loud and obscene even over the station-hum. "I've worked for years to give us hope. It just won't come from a return to the ground. It won't come from waiting and waiting and building up fantasies—"  

“Or fairy tales?” She arches her brow up. “Like the City of Light? You said that it’s real, it feels _real_. But it sounds like giving up. It sounds like letting go of one fantasy and retreating into another.” 

Instead of arguing again, as Clarke had predicted she would, Becca inclines her head and then returns to settle on the edge of her stool again. She takes a deep breath and lets it out again on a sigh. Her quick brain, Clarke thinks, taking that moment to reassess, sifting data and redrawing conclusions.  

"In a way,” she concedes, “I suppose it is. But I would rather immerse myself in that fantasy than live here, doing nothing but surviving, passing on a bit of knowledge to the next generation and then waiting to die. That's my choice. And you have to make one, too. Now that you know about the City, anything you do, taking the chip or walking back out that door, it's a choice. And Clarke—that's a blessing."  

Nothing in this moment feels like being blessed. She feels cold and hard inside, like whatever was still left of the child in her has died and passed away.  

"We so rarely get true choices in life," Becca is saying. "So much of what we think are choices are pre-determined—"  

"Like fate?"  

"By circumstance. If one option is death and one life, is there any choice at all? Is there anything you wouldn't do to keep on living?"  

Clarke thinks of her parents, down on Earth waiting for the missiles to launch. Knowing they would launch. She imagines the certainty of death looming and the dread of it, and the riot of noise they must have heard in their heads, the ragged, fraught defiance of life itself against that final threat. The desperation of it. Boarding the ship and leaving everything behind except life, carrying it with them into an unknown no human being before them had ever faced.  

For the first time, she understands what that feeling, fear and excitement and curiosity and, glinting through the rest, a fierce and desperate need to _live_ , might have been like. 

She does not know if the City of Light is for the living, but— But. Does she believe that what she has on the Ark is truly living? Is it not just surviving, sustaining herself in a limbo from which only death is an escape?  

Is this the existence her parents risked everything for? Would they blame her for searching out something better than what she has been born into? 

If she walks away, she will exist on the Ark until she dies. That is a truth she has come to accept. If she stays, if she agrees to Becca’s plan, anything could happen. Perhaps a sort of death. Perhaps an eternal dream. But if so, it might be the sweetest dream she’s ever had, and only her due. Hasn’t she been promised this, the sky and the trees and the animals, the breeze, the distances, for eighteen sunless years? 

She picks up the tiny blue chip and holds it carefully in the palm of her hand: a whole world in the palm of her hand, Earth there against the soft organic film of her skin. And she waits for her spine to stiffen with the strength of her resolve, waits for the promise of new life itself to open up inside her and ahead. She imagines it unfurling out to a horizon that, like all horizons, she has before this moment only ever been able to imagine, in her mind already a dream world more real than waking life, a vision more acute than sight, a home where at last she, they, can thrive.  

*  

_After she took the chip, she fell into a deep sleep from which no one, not even the most brilliant doctors on the Ark, could wake her. Her body was displayed in the Alpha Station commons and she was mourned as if she had died, even though she continued to breathe and her heart to beat. Some said she was even more beautiful in sleep than she had been in life. They started to refer to her as the Princess of Alpha and the Sleeping Beauty of the Ark. By the time her parents and the rest of the ground-born generation died, her real name had fallen almost completely into disuse._   

_Eventually, unwilling to kill her but without hope that she would ever wake, the Council voted to move her body into a secret room deep in the Ark’s depths. They hoped that, with time, the rumors that surrounded her would die away. That the people would forget._   

_But the stories remain. The most persistent part of the legend is that the princess will awaken again one day, but only after she has spent ninety-seven years deep in her undisturbed sleep._   

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me on tumblr @kinetic-elaboration, and an accompanying moodboard for this fic [here](http://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/183533606660/and-they-lived-a-sleeping-beauty-au-chapter-two).


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